Rejected by 16 colleges, hired by Google. Now he pursues some of the schools for anti-Asian discrimination

Stanley Zhong had a cumulative weighted average of 4.42, an almost perfect SAT score, had beaten adults in competitive coding competitions and started its own electronic signature service while being in high school.

When the time came to apply for colleges, Zhong’s family was not too concerned about his prospects, even in an increasingly competitive admission environment.

But, at the end of his last year in Palo Alto in 2023, Zhong received letters of rejection at 16 of the 18 colleges in which he applied, including five campuses from the University of California that his father had thought of being security schools.

“It was surprised after surprise, then it turned into frustration and, finally, to anger,” said his father, Nan Zhong, in Times in a recent interview. “And I think that Stanley and I felt the same thing, that something is really funky here.”

Less than a year later, as a college recruit in Texas, Zhong was hired by Google for a software engineering position which generally requires an advanced diploma. Now, he and his father are pursuing several of the colleges that rejected him.

Zhong, 19, and his father, Nan Zhong, has laid this year a series of prosecution alleging that colleges, including those of the University of California system, are committed to “racly discriminatory admission practices which have disadvantaged American Asian applicants”, according to civil complaints, which were written with the help of artificial intelligence. The most recent trial was filed against Cornell University last week.

Stanley Zhong refused a time request for an interview through his father.

The taking into account of the race in university admission has been a fervent debate in America for decades, becoming more and more since the Supreme Court canceled in 2023 positive action policies in colleges and universities which use the race as a factor to decide which is admitted. The decision brought back the previous decisions of the courts dating from 1978 which judged that universities had a convincing interest in seeking racial diversity on campuses and could consider the breed of black and Latinos students as a factor more during the choice among qualified candidates.

Supporters of positive action maintain that it helps to level the rules of the game for disadvantaged groups and creates a more diverse student body. But those who oppose it say that the idea undermines the selection processes based on merit and discriminates the qualified candidates.

In California, the systems of the University of California and California State University have long been prohibited from using the breed as an intake factor.

“We believe that it is a without merit costume that seeks to distract us from our mission to provide California students with world class education,” a spokesman for the University of California wrote in a declaration to Times. “Given that taking into account the race in admissions was prohibited in California in 1996, the University of California adjusted its admission practices to comply with the law. We support our admission policies and our record for access to the expansion of all qualified students. ”

Although the UC application collects information on the breed and ethnicity of a student, these details are only used for data collection and are not shared with candidates or taking into account during the admission process, according to UC spokesperson.

Americans of Asian origin have long had the highest admission rates among first -year Californians compared to other racial and ethnic groups. The UC Fall 2024 registration data, published in January, showed that Asian Americans were the largest group of undergraduate students with 36.3%.

But Nan Zhong relieves in the trial that a high percentage of registered Asian Americans does not prove that colleges do not use discriminatory practices. He quotes the report of a California state auditor from 2020 who found that the California University campuses did not adequately supervise readers who assess applications, potentially creating a risk that their assessments be “unjust or inconsistent”.

“Campus have not taken critical measures to protect candidates from readers’ biases,” said the report. “They provided the readers of applications demographic information from candidates, including their names, mother tongues and their places of birth, which could bias readers’ assessments.”

A Cornell spokesperson refused to comment on the trial.

Last week, the United States Ministry said that it would investigate four universities in California – UCLA, UC Irvine, Stanford and UC Berkeley – for a potential “illegal dei” in admissions, suggesting that schools have flouted state and federal laws using the race as a factor in the assessment of university candidates.

Atty. General Pam Bondi declared in a statement that she and President Trump “dedicated to the end of illegal discrimination and the restoration of opportunities based on merit across the country.”

The college admission process has long been wrapped in mystery, which can contribute to the concern that certain students are held at a higher level than others, for reasons other than test notes and results, according to experts. Admissions for highly sought -after majors such as IT makes admissions even more competitive with limited space, in particular in the UC system, and growing demand.

“For the UCS, you only need a small weakness to get a rejection,” said Jeffrey Haig, a consultant to college admission to Orange County.

Although colleges are not allowed to look at the race, they can look at the history, life experiences and the challenges of a student, who can become an important part of a request, said Haig.

Zhong’s ability for programming was obvious at the start of his adolescence, according to his father. He won second place in the MIT Battlecode high school division and qualified for the semi-final of the Google Code Jam coding competition, a global coding competition.

In 2019, when he was 13 years old, Zhong was approached by a Google recruiter to discuss the company’s software engineering positions. Given its age, the company was unable to occupy a full -time position, but the recruiter proposed to save his curriculum vitae for future follow -up, according to an exchange of emails included in the trial.

In 2021, Zhong launched Rabbitsign, a free electronic signing service that said that his father said Stanley’s desire to help provide a profitable alternative to the other signature services paid when the request jumped during the pandemic.

“These things would be difficult to achieve even for professionals,” said Nan Zhong. “And we therefore thought that for him – with this kind of skills titles – that an undergraduate computer program should be reasonable enough for him. But unfortunately, it turned out that it was not at all the case.”

Zhong applied to IT programs at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC San Diego and California Polytechnic State University. He also asked for admission to several private or outside colleges, including MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Wisconsin University, Washington University and Caltech.

After the refusals started to roll, Nan Zhong tried to understand what had gone wrong. Has his son answered personal questions in a strange way? Was there a blatant problem with his test? The university advisers examined his request and found nothing explaining the phenomenon, said Nan Zhong.

He also started to hear stories of American families of Asian origin from their children in admission, despite what they thought they were solid applications.

“While the data were starting to build, I started to think that there must be something here,” said Nan Zhong. “If you look at a case, you may reject it as a random blip, but once you look at tons and tons, the models are starting to emerge. This is when we started to suspect racial discrimination.”

Zhong obtained admission to the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Maryland. He chose to register for UT Austin, but left after being 18 years old and accept a job offer at Google. Nan Zhong also works at Google, but is employed in another department and said that he had no role in the hiring of his son.

In the months following his son’s refusals, Nan Zhong contacted the Board of Directors of the UC, elected officials and even Governor Gavin Newsom, urging them to make the admission process to the college clearer and alleged that Americans of Asian origin are held at a higher level than other candidates.

Han Mi Yoon-Wu, associate vice-prevôt and executive director of the UC system first cycle admission, denied any form of discrimination in a letter to Nan Zhong in March 2024, claiming that the UC system does not grant a preferential treatment to a applicant on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.

“Not only are Americans of Asian origin well represented at the UC, but the proportion of Americans of Asian origin in the California admission swimming pool has remained stable in recent years. In fact, Americans of Asian origin have represented the highest proportion, almost 40% of the first year class of California 2023 of the university,” wrote Yoon-Wu.

While Nan Zhong asked for the lawyer for several law firms before depositing his case, he was too met with refusals or no response. He therefore deposited the case himself with the help of Chatgpt and Gemini.

Heidi Reavis, managing partner of the law firm of Readis page JUMP LLP, said that the use of AI in the drafting of the legal deposit will probably have no impact on the evaluation by the judge of documents and legal arguments. Readis said that lawyers may have hesitated to focus on a case that could have such a long and expensive litigation process where lawyers simply do not agree with Zhongs’ concerns about the admission process.

“While the underlying statements of Stanley Zhong follow his experience of the unfortunate admissions, the case is a cause. Zhongs and their Sword co-plaing (students who oppose racial discrimination) are largely difficult for university admission systems which can have diversity objectives with which many lawyers are sympathetic and, in fact, Readis.